Don’t the weeks go quickly… I am told it’s a sure sign that I am getting older…

Whatever anyone says, Education Leeds has become a brilliant organisation and the most impressive thing about it is the combination of strong, energetic, dynamic and distributed leadership coupled to trusting, empowered and powerful relationships with our schools and our partners! We must always remember that ours is a people business where relationships and people really matter….in fact they are probably the only things that really matter in the end.

I have had another interesting half-term… challenging, annoying, frustrating, refreshing, encouraging, enlightening and uplifting… in roughly equal measures. We must all continue to listen to our colleagues and our critics and to learn from them and from our successes and our mistakes. We must continue to carefully coach, nurture and release the enormous talent that exists in our colleagues, in our teams, in our schools and across the Children’s Services world! That way we will continue to really make a difference and enable and empower our colleagues to do the things that need doing… the simple things, the straight-forward things, the necessary things, the hard things and the sometimes downright impossible things.

We must always remember that outcomes are everything. It is only as a result of our focused, determined and disciplined actions that we will have an impact and achieve the outcomes we want for our children and young people and ensure that they are all happy, healthy, safe and successful.

The agenda is enormous... developing new and improved models of leadership and governance, supporting underperforming and disaffected young people, tackling underperforming and coasting schools, driving forward with the 'Building Schools for the Future' programme, delivering the 14 - 19 transformational programme and making our schools more inclusive and effective as learning places at the heart of healthy, thriving and harmonious communities. Whatever you do after half-term, do something to take this agenda forward and to improve outcomes for children and young people here in Leeds!

Keep the faith
Chris